Mary King

Dr. Mary E. King "is Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies, University for Peace, affiliated with the UN, whose main campus is in Costa Rica. She is Distinguished Scholar with The American University Center for Global Peace, Washington, D.C. Having been Senior Fellow, Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford, United Kingdom, during 2004 and 2005, she retains a visiting research fellowship at the institute.

"Professor King has been scholar-practitioner of international relations for 30 years, requiring personal contact with heads of state and government ministers of more than 120 developing countries. As a presidential appointee in the Carter Administration, she had worldwide oversight for the Peace Corps (60 countries), VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America), Retired Senior Volunteer Program (R.S.V.P.), Foster Grandparents, and other national volunteer service corps programs. Since 1984, she has served as a special adviser to former president Jimmy Carter, often acting as his emissary.

"As a young student, she worked alongside the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (no relation) in the U.S. civil rights movement. The New York Times described her as one of a “tiny handful” of white, female “heroic, unsung organizers of the Southern civil rights movement.” Her book on that four-year experience, Freedom Song: A Personal Story of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, won her a Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Book Award in 1988.

"In 2002, the second edition of her book, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr: The Power of Nonviolent Action—chronicling nine contemporary nonviolent struggles and originally published by UNESCO in Paris in 1999—was brought out in New Delhi by the Indian Council for Cultural Relations and Mehta Publishers.

"In November 2003, she was given the Jamnalal Bajaj International Award, which recognizes the promotion of Gandhian values outside India. In receiving this prize in Mumbai (Bombay), India, she joined the ranks of such previous winners as Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu of South Africa, Professor Sir Joseph Rotblat of the United Kingdom, and Professor Johan Galtung of Norway.

"Her doctorate in international politics is from the University of Wales at Aberystwyth. In 1989, her alma mater Ohio Wesleyan University bestowed on her its highest award for distinguished achievement.

"King was co-author, with Casey Hayden, of “Sex and Caste,” a 1966 article that, according to American historian Ruth Rosen in The World Split Open: How the Women’s Movement Changed America, made her a central figure in starting the contemporary women’s movement in the United States, or so-called second-wave feminism.

"She is at work on two books about popular movements of nonviolent action, one in the Middle East in the late 1980s, and the other in India in the 1920s." 

"Dr. King’s leadership has extended to a number of boards of private voluntary agencies and nongovernmental organisations concerned with international development, peace, and conflict resolution, including the International Advisory Council, Auroville Foundation, Tamil Nadu, India, appointed by the Government of India in 1998; the International Commission on Peace and Food, Chennai, India (successor to the Brandt, Palme and Brundtland Commissions), 1989-1994; officer of the Arca Foundation, Washington DC, a private philanthropy funding international human rights and pro-democracy initiatives, from 1980 through the present; board of the American Institute for Public Service, which bestows annually the Jefferson Awards, from 1993 through the present; member, board of directors, Save the Children Community Development Federation, Westport, Connecticut, from 1980 to 1991." pdf


 * Academic Advisory Board, International Center on Nonviolent Conflict
 * Director, Albert Einstein Institution
 * Director, AMIDEAST
 * Director, Arca Foundation
 * International Board of Directors, Youth Advocate Program International